Football: Boucher, New Hampshire extend Shrine streak to 14

HANOVER — Alec Boucher reached out with one hand, plucked the ball from the air and took on a Vermont tackler, finishing his 40-yard reception with a stiff-arm along the sideline.

RYAN O'LEARY

HANOVER — Alec Boucher reached out with one hand, plucked the ball from the air and took on a Vermont tackler, finishing his 40-yard reception with a stiff-arm along the sideline.

Another year and another New Hampshire romp at the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl. The Granite Staters pushed their brothers from the West away like a tackling dummy, again.

Salem's Jason Martinez rushed for 111 yards and two touchdowns, quarterback Trevor Knight passed for three scores and New Hampshire pushed its win streak over Vermont to 14 games with a 42-6 win at Dartmouth College.

Boucher, the star receiver from Winnacunnet High School, led New Hampshire's receivers with four receptions for 92 yards. The Granite State won the game by 34 points or more for the fifth time in seven years and now leads the series 46-13-2.

"We never wanted to take Vermont lightly and we tried to show a lot of class to them in the halls and everything," said Portsmouth grad Patrick Glynn, referring back to the teams' shared training camp facility at Castleton State College (Vt.). "But it was definitely hard to put the fact aside, that we could definitely win this and we had a really good chance of winning it."

Never a doubt. New Hampshire's offense struck on its second play from scrimmage, a 37-yard touchdown pass from Knight to Bedford's Nick Vailas down the left sideline.

From there, N.H.'s big and overpowering defense limited Vermont to 131 total yards of offense and a scoreless second half.

"The coaches, first day, said we're not going to have a defensive plan, we're just going to let you go," said Exeter's Collin Richardson, N.H.'s nose guard who finished fifth on the team with six tackles. "They just let us go and we were just animals."

New Hampshire opened a 20-0 lead in the first quarter after a three-play drive that covered 61 yards. The drive started when Knight, the quarterback bound for UNH this fall, lofted a perfect fly pass down the right sideline that Boucher hauled down with an athletic, one-handed play.

"Trevor put it right there, it was a perfect pass," Boucher said. "There were two defenders right on either side and you couldn't have put it in a better place."

Boucher added a 42-yard reception that sparked another scoring drive late in the second quarter. Merrimack Valley's Cole Martin hauled in a 28-yard touchdown reception, Vailas added a second scoring catch from the goal line, and Martinez scored twice on the ground as New Hampshire took a 33-6 lead into halftime, well on its way to another Shrine Bowl rout.

Vermont's lone score, a 24-yard touchdown pass from James Shufelt to Joseph Couture, came with 5:29 remaining in the half; its two-point conversion try from the 1, following a N.H. penalty, failed on a run attempt up the middle.

It was a recurring theme against New Hampshire's stout defensive line. The team racked up 15 total tackles for a loss, continually driving back and stuffing Vermont's veer offense.

The most intriguing sequence in the game may have been a second-quarter scrum.

Richardson had his helmet torn off during a scuffle that materialized after a play that was blown up in the Vermont backfield. The former Exeter captain took a forearm to the throat and walked to the New Hampshire sideline with his helmet still on the turf, some 15 yards away.

"It was a very chippy game," Richardson said. "At a certain point they just decided it would be better to fight after the play."

"That was scary," Lalime said. "The coaches were definitely looking at me to hold me back. Me and my teammates ran right onto the field. It was just like a shock. You just wanted to help him out."

Scrap as Vermont might, the fight was already long settled.

New Hampshire extended its rotation in the second half. The lone points scored came on a 5-yard run from Concord's Marc Gaudet, who followed Lalime's block to paydirt.

Epping High School's Joe Leclerc and Newmarket's Jake Valinski, teammates for the Epping-Newmarket co-op program for four years, saw time at linebacker together in the fourth quarter. Leclerc finished the game with two tackles.

"We were just so happy to get that one drive together," Leclerc said. "We were waiting on that."

St. Thomas Aquinas grad Hayden Middleton handled N.H.'s kicking duties and went 4-for-6 on extra points. His high school teammate, receiver Jake Geppert, finished with two catches.

New Hampshire got the win for coach David Jackson, the former coach at Merrimack Valley who will rejoin Nashua South's staff this fall as an assistant. His old quarterback, Knight, was among the players dousing him with water bottles as the game went final.

"It was so much fun. It was just like nothing I've ever done in my life," Jackson said of the experience. "It shouldn't be possible, but they became a loving, caring family in a week."

Advertise

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
seacoastonline.com ~ 111 New Hampshire Ave., Portsmouth, NH 03801 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service